Real Talk: The Transition to Motherhood

Published Jul 22, 2024, 4:30 AM

Motherhood can be a time of profound internal upheaval, says clinical psychologist Molly Millwood. Molly offers an honest look at the transition into motherhood, drawing from scientific research, stories from her private practice, and her own experiences as a mother. She and Maya talk about how to navigate the grief, guilt, ambivalence, and other disorienting feelings that can often come up for new moms. 

For more on Molly, check out her book “To Have and To Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma.”

If you liked this episode, we recommend listening to “The Devastation of Things Going Exactly to Plan.” 

Sign up for Maya's new newsletter here https://bit.ly/41lPqaZ and follow her on instagram @DrMayaShankar.

Pushkin.

I had had such a grueling day with my son, and I was exhausted, and when I sat down for the first time all day, having just put him to bed, what came almost flooding in was the sensation of longing for the life I had before he was born. And then I very quickly had an experience of shame about that, Like what kind of person misses the life she had before she had a baby that she loved so much.

Molly Millwood is a clinical psychology who counsels new moms. She's also a mom herself, and she's made it her mission to say the quiet part out loud, to share just how challenging and profound the transition to motherhood can be.

I think motherhood sort of ushers in for most women, this chapter of reckoning, of confronting illusions about ourselves that we sometimes didn't even know we had that we are then forced to let go of, and that process of letting go can be very messy and very painful.

On today's episode, Real Talk about the transition to motherhood, I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become In the face of a big change. Mollie's a psychology professor and a therapist who works mostly with new mothers and parents. She wrote a stunningly honest book about the experience of entering motherhood. It's called To Have and to Hold, Motherhood, Marriage and the Modern Dilemma. I recommended it to many of my friends who've recently become moms. One of my friends in particular, is struggling with mom guilt and other disorienting feelings. She said she felt like Mollie had written the book just for her. The book is full of insights from Mollie's work as a therapist and an academic, but she also shares her own challenges as a mom, struggles she simply wasn't expecting because before having kids, she says, she was a very even, keel person.

I even got the nickname as an adolescent Molly feel Good because I just seem to be generally feeling good and making other people feel good, not in a sort of loud, overly exuberant or cheerful way, but just quietly calm and content. And because of that, I think I had this idea that I was going to have a deeper well of patience than the average person, and that that sort of emotional stability that characterized me my whole life until then would not only continue in motherhood, but would also serve me very well as a mother and serve my children well.

Right in your book, you write about how after you had your first child, you had to let go of illusions that you had about yourself and what you thought mothering would look like.

Can you tell me what you meant by that.

I think the illusion that I had to let go of was that emotional calm and balance was some kind of ultra healthy zen state that I was fortunate to occupy, when instead what it was was that I really wasn't fully in touch with the whole array of emotion that my existence rings, that every human's existence springs, until in motherhood I was bursting at the seams with those emotions. I would say that there were emotions within me in the realm of love and ecstasy and bliss because of this new human being that I treasured so deeply. And it was fun, you know. I was having more fun than I'd ever had before engaging with my baby, and in all these things that we would put in the category of good stuff, I felt all of those much more strongly than I ever had before. And then on the other side, there were episodes of intense anger, maybe borderline rage, not that we'rever acted upon. When my baby wouldn't stop crying, I would have these layers of despair. You know, it hurts so much for your baby to be crying and to be unable to console them, like why will my baby not stop crying, and in a sense blaming him, this innocent little baby, which makes no logical sense. But I know that that's such a common experience. And I wrote in the book about resentment, you know that sometimes moms even resent their babies, which is sort of a more insidious emotion than just anger. Sure, it bruis for a while and kind of culminates over time. So I think motherhood just sort of puts us on the outer bounds of these emotions that we experience in the rest of life. Most of the time, they're not totally foreign or alien to us. They're just so much more intense in the context of motherhood.

Yeah, you write in the book that at one point your husband felt like he couldn't even recognize you. I mean, what was it like to run up against that in the throes of new motherhood where you're already feeling overwhelmed, and then suddenly you find yourself unrecognizable, not just to your husband, but what I'm hearing is to yourself.

Yes, he said I was hostile and cold. It was really really hard to get that feedback, and at the same time it resonated. It's like he was speaking a truth that neither one of us could deny. He was the one who was just a little more ready to put it into words. I don't love the words he chose. I think there are probably more gentle ways that he could have given me that feedback, but it was such a pivotal moment because it meant that I couldn't keep denying there.

Was a problem.

But here's where I want to be really careful to say that it's not as if I was clinically depressed, and it's not as if I look back on that period of my early motherhood and remember myself being deeply unhappy. I absolutely was not.

I think it's very powerful that you mentioned that you didn't have postpartum depression. What I hear when you say that is for even those fortunate enough to not suffer from serious mental health conditions following a pregnancy. The road forward is still very fraud yea, and very hard. And I think it's important to say that out loud, because I imagine there are many women listening to this who really felt off and went to their physicians and didn't get the formal diagnosis and then thought, well, then, what the hell's wrong with me? Why am I like this? This is horrible, Like I must be damaged or flawed or not meant for motherhood.

Yeah, it's really one of the central reasons I wanted to write this book because I knew that there were so many women. There are so many women who are aware of the symptoms of postpartum depression, and who would go to their doctor for their six week checkup and be told, you know, you passed the screening, you don't have depression. And I knew that that in itself would bring about a kind of suffering. Well, then if it isn't depression, what is it.

Let's dig a little deeper into your decision to write this book. You said that at the time there were lots of books on how to be a good mother, had a parent kids.

Well, what kind.

Of book did you feel like you needed in that moment that was harder to find.

I needed a book that would help me make sense of all of what was changing in my internal world, Like the emotional landscape that I was now inhabiting as a mother was so I almost want to say treacherous, you know, like I didn't exactly know what to expect on a given day or a given hour, such a you know, sense of upheaval internally, even if externally I was doing all the things and appeared to be handling the experience of motherhood, and I was. I was so changed internally. As you said, all the books were about how do you do mothering, you know, in pregnancy and afterward, how do you perform this motherhood gig that you're signing on for? You know, because I was studying this, because I was sort of on the front lines with other women having a hard time in motherhood, I knew that my experience was not unique. I was hearing almost identical words coming out of the mouths of multiple clients, and they all sounded like they could be words that I was speaking, And yet everybody was thinking that they were alone, that there was something wrong with them.

It's a very cutting observation from you that in part, the dearth of books on the internal shifts that happened in motherhood speaks to cultural values. We value a mom's ability to parent well versus her well being as a person, as an individual.

Well, I think we need look no further than the woefully inadequate infrastructure in our society of supporting women who are about to become or have recently become mothers. It really doesn't. It barely exists. The notion of sacrifice in motherhood, I think, is just so embedded, like it's just understood. It's taken as a given that a mother will sacrifice quite a lot for her child, including her own well being.

Yeah, we're so anchored to think of introducing a baby into our lives as just something that adds to our life. And you make it a point in your book to talk about you shine a light really on all that mothers lose in the process. And there's a story that you share in your book where you're confronting exactly this, and it starts with you sitting on the steps of your home with a beer in your hand, contemplating your life pre kid.

I had had such a grueling day with my son, who was a colligy baby, and I was exhausted, and when I sat down for the first time all day, having just put him to bed, what came almost flooding in was the sensation of longing for the life I had before he was born. So it wasn't just the exhaustion, it wasn't just the muscle tension from carrying him around all day and trying to get him to stop crying. It was really clearly a feeling of missing what my life was like and what I felt like inside before he was born. And then I very quickly had an experience of shame about that what kind of person misses the life she had before she had a baby that she loved so much? And you know, it's hard even to reminisce. It's hard to think back to that moment because it was so painful, And I think it also really gave rise to this conviction to break out of this constricting mental framework that I was made to have by the lack of honest discourse about what motherhood is like. If somebody had told me ahead of time, it's okay to miss the life you had before you had a baby, and of course you're going to miss the life you had because there were so many great things about it that, at least for now, are gone. If somebody that I trusted had told me that, I like to think I wouldn't have felt the shame. When we're grieving a more obvious loss, the death of a loved one, for example, we have all sorts of permission to feel sad, to feel that longing for what was before, to be in pain. New moms are not given that same permission, because the narrative around motherhood is that it is it's a gain, it's an expansion, it's a beautiful addition to your life, which it is all of those things, and it's also a whole lot of loss, and people just don't have the framework for that.

What are examples of things, Molly that get lost when people become mothers.

I think there's a loss of any semblance of order and organization and to a large degree, control over the things that prior to the baby you sort of took for granted, like your time and how you use that time. My husband jokes that kids are entropy machines, you know, So there's just this utter chaos and degree of messiness, you know, literally and figuratively, and I learned that my you know, the premium that I placed on keeping things organized and tidy and orderly was really a liability in motherhood as opposed to a strength.

Not an asset.

Right, there's a loss at a social level because the conditions of early motherhood are just so isolating with the way that we do it in our society, which is not the right way to do it, you know, which is that you send a new mom home with her baby, and if she's lucky, maybe she has a partner who's around for a little while, but likely that partner goes back to work before she does. It's not typical anymore for women to have family nearby, for women to have even friends who are actually checking in on them in a kind of consistent in person way. If you were accustomed to having daily sort of social interaction and then suddenly you have none or almost none, and the only person that you're interacting with at length as your baby. Yeah, I think for many people there is a loss of identity. And this is another place where it's so tricky, because you could argue you've gained a dimension of your identity, which is now you're a mother, now you're a caregiver. But what happens for most women in this statement I'm about to make is grounded in research, is that other aspects of identity get sort of snuffed out by motherhood. So it becomes much more difficult to be a friend, a daughter, a partner, an artist. And if there isn't a difficulty maintaining them, there's usually really pervasive guilt about choices that are made to do anything other than caretaking. I would say something that comes up so commonly in the women that I work with is, no matter what your arrangement is in terms of work and or staying home with a baby, you feel guilty about it. So there's that phrase that is rightfully very popular now about how you're supposed to work like you don't have a child and parent like you don't have a job.

Oh wow, yeah, I hadn't heard that.

That's the pressure that women feel.

So one of the things that you talk about in your book is that men and women don't tend to experience the same identity shifts in parenthood, and that disconnect can put a really big strain on the relationship.

There is such a difference in how men and women experience the transition to parenthood, and that creates many of the struggles that go on in couples who are new parents. Interestingly, same sex couples don't take quite as much of a hit in terms of their relationship satisfaction as heterosexual couples do, and not coincidentally, same sex couples across the transition to parenthood have a more equitable division of labor. The reason I chose to focus on what goes on in heterosexual couples is that it tells us quite a lot about what ails us at the society level, meaning it tells us just how far we still have to go in terms of equality. There is this terribly unfortunate reverting to traditional gender roles for heterosexual couples, and suddenly, even if a couple had worked very hard to have a sort of egalitarian arrangement, suddenly they've lost that when they're new parents, and suddenly the division of responsibility around the house and with childcare is not equal. So I really wanted to illuminate just how much it matters that the strain of new motherhood is greater than the strain of new fatherhood. And again, I want to be careful to say that's not speculation or opinion, that's there. You know, the research on this is robust that women experience the transition to parenthood in a very different way from how men experience the transition to parenthood.

Yeah, what are working theories around why this is so?

Is it?

It's obviously a very very challenging question to answer empirically, but I'm curious to know what theories exist out there.

Yeah, I mean, I would say the prevailing theories that this has everything to do with socialization and the ways in which men are even now discouraged from taking on too fully the role of caregiving at the expense of breadwinning, and the opposite would be true for women. That you know, sort of the pinnacle of being a proper adult woman is to become a mother and to fully adopt that into your identity. So largely I think this can be explained by these profoundly different ways that men and women are socialized. And there is all kinds of really interesting neuroscience research that suggests there are biological bases for some of this, and that you know, women's brains are wired to be highly attentive to their offspring, and that explains the very aggravating situation of baby cries in the night and somehow dad doesn't hear it, and mom hears it and has to go.

Deal with it.

I saw a really, really funny Instagram reel a while back that was a woman getting in bed on her husband's side. Like the husband was not in the scene. She's getting in bed on his side, and she says, I thought I'd try sleeping over here tonight since apparently the baby's cries can't be heard from here.

Oh that's so fun. I love it.

We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. Ambivalence is a word you come back to over and over and over again in your book book, and you talk about so many of your clients in therapy being shocked by the conflicting emotions that they have towards motherhood. After becoming a mother.

I think oftentimes there's this experience of just profound, fierce love for your baby coupled with boredom, feeling bored by your baby, pulling your hair out because you can't figure out what your baby needs, or because you're so exhausted and frazzled that they're not sleeping for longer than twenty minutes. True mental health is about the freedom to feel whatever there is to feel, the being awake to all of what is beautiful and wonderful in life and also all of what is ugly and painful. That is well being, that is mental health. So in some ways, that ambivalence that new moms feel is you know, you could kind of argue that that's like the height of mental health to be feeling like all the channels are open and they're feeling all of these emotions even when they conflict. But it is really important to say that that array of emotion, it's not just that it's a bunch of different emotions that can kind of fit neatly together. It's that they often are in direct opposition to each other.

Yes, exactly.

So for example, I have worked with so many women and I felt this myself, who say, I am so desperate for breathing room, I'm so desperate for space from my baby, and I can't bear to leave my baby, you know, like it's really makes no sense on the face of it, Like, wait a second, if you're desperate for breathing room, then leave your baby with someone else and go get it. That's where that tortured state comes in, like, how can this possibly be.

A lot of the time you hear people say with a caveat my child, but or I love my partner butt, and we feel almost compelled to justify that love before we criticize any part of the relationship or the process of, in this case, raising a child.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that.

Yeah, I think it's a tension that exists when you use the word butt between two feeling states that you're expressing, and the tension says one of these needs to be resolved, one of these is more true than the other, one of these is more socially sanctioned, and so I'm going to make sure I say it before I say this other more risky one. And I love my child that comes before so many other statements. I think that just goes back to this whole problem of the taboo, you know, incredibly strong taboo against revealing the challenges and the hardships of motherhood. Hm.

There's actually a passage from your book that I would love if you could just read for us, Molly, And it's a statement that you make about being a parent to a second child.

Okay, when my boys were younger, there were times I felt pretty certain that I would have been better off with only one child. I know some readers are thinking, what, how can she say that? Doesn't she know her younger son could read this someday and be devastated. Well, I'm not worried about that. I have faith that my second child will recognize the enormous difference between believing I might have been better suited to be the mother of an only child and regretting his existence. It was never him I sometimes wished weren't around. It was the dynamic of my two children together and the sheer degree of stimulation in my immediate environment that sometimes made me think this isn't the greatest fit for me. If anyone is disparaging me for having felt that way and for putting it down here on the page, that is a reflection of the very reason I wanted to write this book. The complex truths of motherhood will continue to make everyone uncomfortable and ashamed until they're articulated readily and repeatedly. My love for Quinn, my second son, is deep and fierce. I do not favor Noah over him. There is nothing I wouldn't do to protect him, and there is no threat more ominous than the threat of losing either one of them. It's silly that I'm even saying all this, but therein lies the problem. We are afraid that if we give voice to the darker, less acceptable feasts of our experience as mothers, this will somehow render the prettier, acceptable facets untrue.

I love that you just double down in that moment and said it like it was. You were like, I know y'all are judging me right now, and I'm just going to keep saying it anyway. And that's a powerful mic drop moment that I'm just grateful that you didn't.

And I'm sure it was really hard to write. I'm sure that took a lot of courage.

Yes, it was hard even to put the words on the page, and harder still to publish it. There's such a taboo against exposing, you know, the dark side of motherhood, and a really common thing that people say when they hear about some grievance that a mother has about motherhood is well, then maybe you shouldn't have had kids. And this just fascinates and sort of bewilders me, because nobody says that about any other realm of life in which there are mixed feelings, Like if you have grievances about your husband, people don't say, well, then maybe you shouldn't have gotten married. Right, It's just assumed that marriage is hard and that occasionally you're gonna have problems with your partner. Or if you're complaining about some aspect of your work, nobody says, well, then maybe you shouldn't be employed. You. So, in every other realm, there's permission to have the good stuff and the less good stuff. But if you give voice to the less good stuff in the realm of motherhood, it's risky. People say, then why do you sign up for this as if it's supposed to be purely wonderful at all times.

Yeah. Yeah.

There's an expectations problem here, which is the expectation society sets around what the experience of transitioning to motherhood will be like. Tell me a bit about how expectations broadly lead to suffering. In the context of motherhood.

Pain is inevitable, both emotional pain and physical pain. We do not get through life without experiencing pain. Suffering is when there's pain plus some kind of resistance to the pain, and that Resistance could take many different forms. It could be that you're wishing it away. It could be that you're telling yourself this shouldn't be happening to me. It could be that you're racking your brain trying to understand why it's happening to you. So I'm using that term resistance very broadly. And what I have wished for so much in the realm of motherhood is that we could all just feel the pain of it, without the suffering, because there is no getting around how hard it is to be a mother. I think offering comes when we believe everyone else is having an easier time, and therefore we start to wonder what's wrong with us. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Maybe motherhood isn't a good fit for me. I missed an important memo. You know, all the things you might say to yourself if you're under the illusion that other people are having an easier time in motherhood.

There's a beautiful metaphor that you paint at the end of the book, Molly, about what that shift in identity in motherhood is and what it looks like. So there's this scene where your son, Quinn, who's four and a half of the time, has a nightmare in the middle of the night, and he comes to join you and your husband in bed. Do you mind sharing that story with us?

Yeah. He used to do this very funny thing, which was that rather than climbing into bed between my husband and me, he always wanted to lie down where I was. And his way of putting that was let me trade places with you. So he would come to my side of the bed and say, let me trade places with you. And what he meant by that was you scooch over so that I can lie down write where you were. As I write in the book quote, it's as if he needs to sink his little body into the imprint of mine and rest his head on the exact part of the pillow where mine left its mark. And once he has done so, he is asleep in an instant. And I think this is the beauty and the curse of motherhood, displaced by the person I love so fiercely that I don't mind, and I do, you know, I want to be really careful to say that I did mind for quite a while, and that was part of the way, was part of the struggle. And I think most women feel that way. That There's something really really difficult about having to kind of create space for two where there once was only one. And maybe what I had earned over time was a kind of confidence that even though I wasn't in my same exact place where I was before, I would be okay in this new place.

Hey, thanks so much for listening. We'll link to Molly's book in the show notes. Next week, join me for my conversation with psychotherapist Alan Gordon. He has a radically straightforward and accessible approach to treating chronic pain. And if you enjoyed this conversation, we on the Slight Change team would be so grateful if you shared this episode with someone you know, it helps us get the word out so we can keep making more episodes for you. Thanks so much. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our senior producer Trisha Bbida, and our engineer Eric o'bwang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so a big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a slight change of plans on Instagram as doctor Maya Shunker See you next week.

A Slight Change of Plans

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